


Laid Bare

by khilari



Series: Feliks [1]
Category: Girl Genius
Genre: Dark, Gen, Suicide Attempt, Vivisection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-07
Updated: 2013-05-07
Packaged: 2017-12-10 15:27:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/787574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/khilari/pseuds/khilari
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-canon. Agatha is cleaning out a Spark's lab when she discovers a captive Jäger unconscious in the basement.</p><p>A very dark take on some of the implications of Jäger biology as classified information.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Laid Bare

The sound of something breaking and the accompanying smell of formaldehyde and rot made Agatha sigh, and Oggie’s subdued, ‘sorry,’ didn’t make her feel less frustrated. Taking down a Spark who had been terrorising people with squid-wolves, parrot-bears, and assorted other hybrids was the kind of thing it was useful to have Jägers along for. Sorting through said Spark’s laboratory afterwards wasn’t. Krosp, her other companion, had curled up in a patch of sun outside the door and gone to sleep as soon as he was sure Agatha’s life was no longer in danger.

‘You three go and check the basement,’ she said, just to get them somewhere out of the way. ‘Come and get me if you find anything alive.’ Or anyone, but he seemed to have been working with animals. _Mostly_ , she amended mentally, as pulling a sheet away from a pile revealed a large jar of arms.

The three of them moved away from her towards the trapdoor on the other side of the room. Dimo, being closest, was the one to pull it up. He stopped, still holding it ajar, and looked back over his shoulder at the other two. ‘Hy go. Hyu stay vit Miz Agatha.’ Then he disappeared down it, letting it thud back into place behind him.

Agatha had barely had time to be exasperated that he’d left her with the two Jägers more likely to break things when she noticed the anxious look Maxim and Oggie were exchanging. ‘What?’ she asked.

They looked at her. ‘If dere iz something dangerous up here he vould haff stayed —’ Maxim began.

‘Und if dere iz something dangerous down dere ve should haff gone,’ Oggie finished, gazing at the trapdoor.

A moment later Dimo yelled, ‘Miz Agatha!’ It was muffled by the trapdoor but full of a frantic urgency that had Agatha grabbing a deathray and charging before it had died away. Oggie wrenched the trapdoor open and Agatha shoved past him to run full tilt down the stone steps. There were cages at the bottom, a narrow stone passageway running between iron doors, and the smell of rotting meat. Dimo had the door of a cage open and was crouched in it, looking back over his shoulder wide eyed. Nothing was reaching for him, nothing was _moving_.

‘What happened?’ Agatha demanded, feeling her heart still beating hard in her chest.

Dimo stood up and moved aside and, for the first time, Agatha could see the occupant of the cage. He was green, clawed, although the claws had been filed down to nubs. She couldn’t see his teeth, a wooden gag was covering half his face, but he was recognisable as a Jäger. Mercifully unconscious, she wouldn’t be sure he was alive except for Dimo’s urgency. ‘Oh.’ She stepped forward and bent down, putting a hand to the Jäger’s throat and finding a sluggish pulse. He was naked, scars and cuts in various stages of healing covering his body. The largest scar was a Y shaped incision down his front, someone had _opened him up_ as if they were doing an autopsy, they’d probably broken the ribs to get to the organs. Parallel incisions running down the arms and legs, circular scars with stitches around one wrist and one ankle, the Spark had _cut them off._ Ragged scars overlapped the circle around the wrist, they were on the other wrist too and the throat, not surgical at all; Agatha looked down at the Jäger’s claws and swallowed.

‘Feliks?’ Oggie asked from behind her, voice sounding very small.

Agatha flinched. _Of course_ he had a name, and the Jägers _all_ knew each other, she’d got used to that. She took a deep breath and then wished she hadn’t, the air down here was rank. ‘Stretcher,’ she barked. ‘There’s a sheet upstairs, I saw a ladder you can break to make supports for it. Maxim, Oggie, _go_.’

They went, feet pounding up the stairs behind her. It occured to her a moment later that there should have been a stretcher, or how had the Spark been getting his subject up and down the stairs? No time to search for it, though.

‘He’s lost a lot of blood,’ she said aloud, not sure whether she was informing Dimo or trying to keep herself calm. Underneath the horror of the whole situation was anger, the Jägers were _hers_ , and guilt that she had somehow failed this one badly. ‘Mostly he’s dehydrated. I think the Spark forgot about him to fight us. If I can get him on a drip it should be okay, and there’s equipment upstairs. I can fix the hand and foot.’ Severed limbs were probably the most common thing she had to fix for Jägers. ‘I don’t know what else was done, I think it was mostly looking.’ Classified Jäger biology. She looked at the ragged scratches at the throat again. Had he tried to kill himself because he was being tortured, or because a Spark could learn less from a dead Jäger than a live one? She swallowed again and looked at Dimo. ‘Did you know he was down here?’

‘Schmelled Jäger und old blood,’ Dimo said quietly. ‘Thott he vas already dead.’

‘And if he had been you wouldn’t have told me,’ said Agatha, words coming out somewhere between accusing and tired.

‘Vouldn’t haff told anyvun,’ Dimo answered, eyes turning towards the stairs.

Agatha nodded, because no matter how she felt about the possibility of having this concealed from her, her Jägers really didn’t need to know that this could happen to a friend.

Maxim and Oggie arrived a few moments later with the stretcher. Agatha and Dimo lifted Feliks onto it and Maxim and Oggie carried him up the stairs — quietly, gently, solemnly — and held the stretcher steady while Agatha and Dimo got him onto an operating table. Not that she was planning on operating while he was still dehydrated and short on blood, but there weren’t any beds anyway. She yelled at them to go and boil some water — Jägers were almost impossible to infect, and if he hadn’t been infected from the conditions in the cages he probably wasn’t going to be now, but that was no excuse for lax hospital procedures and the lab was _terribly_ kept — bring soap from her luggage and find some bandages.

Once it was done, and thank God the Spark had kept some blood substitute on hand, Feliks hooked up to the drip, wounds cleaned and bandaged and, in some cases, stitched, Agatha cleaned herself off and looked around. Oggie was slumped in a corner, sniffling, Dimo with one hand on his shoulder looking as if he was trying to offer comfort.

‘He’s stable,’ she said, and Oggie swiped the back of his wrist across his eyes before giving her a shaky smile. ‘Where’s Maxim?’

‘He vent back down,’ Dimo said, nodding at the trapdoor.

Agatha frowned. Maybe he’d gone back to get on with clearing it out like she’d told them to do, just for something to take his mind off the situation. She could understand that impulse. ‘I’ll just go and tell him,’ she said. Somehow she wanted to see them all, as if this place might be dangerous to Jägers all by itself.

At the bottom of the stairs was a torn piece of another sheet with a pile of tiny pieces of what looked like black fabric on it. Maxim was kneeling in the door to Feliks’ cage as if searching for something. ‘Maxim,’ she called. He looked up, eyes meeting hers solemnly. ‘I came to let you know Feliks is stable,’ she said. Then, looking at the pile of scraps, ‘What is this?’

‘Hiz hat.’

 _Oh_. Agatha had probably spent too much time around Jägers, because she could see that from their perspective. Their hats were their honour, and the Spark wouldn’t have cared about a hat either way, so if someone had torn it up it would have been Feliks because he hadn’t been able to keep the Heterodyne secrets that had gone into his creation. She stared at the filthy scraps. ‘I don’t think you’re going to be able to fix that,’ she blurted out.

‘Vill try anyvay,’ Maxim said, gaze dropping as he went back to his hunt.

‘Yes,’ said Agatha. ‘Okay.’ Then she went upstairs and outside because she was the Heterodyne and she wasn’t going to cry in front of her Jägers right now.


End file.
